It feels like Home. #Sweet2Senegal

50 days before I left for Senegal I was working in Philadelphia at the Penn State Center as a Community Schools intern. I was interviewing people in the city who were actively trying to engage the community to become responsible and to fight for their children’s public education reform. However now, it has been 50 days since I have been installed living in Botou. Can you guess where I am in my village? In the school of course!

Living at site, I was trying to find a purpose and direction on where I was headed as well as what projects I would want to start in the future. I honestly was lost. Until I thought about it, my home is the classroom. It is where I feel comfortable, where I can be myself (even act a little goofy), and I feel that I can set objectives and conquer them. Although the classrooms here are a little different because I have to speak a mixture of French and Bambara, I felt as if I got my courage back and life sprung back in me. So what did I do you may ask? We had ourselves a little competition in Botou!

In the Peace Corps we are encouraged to do mini projects to keep ourselves busy while our main projects are taking form or if we are waiting for grants to pass. It seems through a lot of Peace Corps projects murals have been very successful and a way to beatify an area. The only problem that I see is that the murals are never in the hands of the community and what they would like to see. Idea time! Why not have a healthy competition in the classrooms and have the students draw what they would want to see in their classroom! However there had to be rules like every good competition. The students would need to write what they were studying that year and then draw a design of what they thought would look good in their room. After talking with the students and the teachers (in very broken French!) the competition was off! The students, and of course myself maybe more than the kids, were so excited. For an entire week, students would come to my hut and ask my opinion or if they could borrow my colored pencils to add in a couple more designs. At the end of the week I went to each classroom and lined up all the designs and had the kids vote on which ones they liked the best and then we had the winners! Although some of the ideas may need slight adaptions because of what they are actually learning in school, I have never seen the kids so excited and proud of what they accomplished.

After I went home that night, I felt it. I felt the feeling I have been waiting to feel since I have been here. After being in the classroom I finally felt home.

Peace Only.